


we fall apart as it gets dark

by orphan_account



Category: NCT (Band), SuperM (Korea Band)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Heavy Angst, Lee Donghyuck | Haechan & Mark Lee Are Best Friends, M/M, Mark Lee (NCT) Had a Bad Year, Mark Lee (NCT) Needs a Hug, Mark Lee (NCT) is Whipped, Mark Lee (NCT) is a Mess, Mark Lee (NCT)-centric, Post-Break Up, Sad, Self-Doubt, Self-Hatred, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25667887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Closure is not easy to find most of the time, even less so when it is not sought out. Mark wants to know it's out there for him, though, whenever he is ready. Given the circumstance, it probably won't be. Understanding the how and the why is a privilege he has learned not everyone is entitled to.Mark supposes he'll have to find some other way to process losing the person he held closest to his heart.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	we fall apart as it gets dark

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this to the wrong account, and had to repost it here because I'm a dumbass. Anyways, hiya! It's been a while. 
> 
> Thank you for clicking on this, and giving it a chance. Just the opportunity to share my work is something I'm grateful for, so I want you guys to know how much I appreciate you being the audience for my works. This particular story was rather difficult to write, so I'd also like to give a massive thank you to Ivy, who looked it over in my stead to ensure it wasn't an eye-sore before I posted it. 
> 
> Enjoy.

The door clicks softly into its original place behind him, followed by the clink of his keys into their bowl, and the unsteady tap of his crutches against the floor of his apartment as he enters. Darkness consumes everything, not even streetlights touching his neat little apartment at the edge of the city, at the edge of the world. It feels more like the end of the world, these days, because Mark doesn’t do anything in half-measures. When he laughs, he laughs, when he loves, he loves, and when he hurts, he hurts like there’s not much more he’s meant to be than the universe’s punching bag.

There are things waiting on the other side of this tunnel, though. This he knows. This he understands as reality, even if he feels stuck inside of his own head more often than not these days.

They say it will be easier to keep walking forward, to find that exit, if he just accepts things as they are and moves on.

Accept things for what they are, his friends ask, easily, as if the thought doesn’t twist the knife that’s been embedded in Mark’s chest for weeks.

At some point, he’ll grit his teeth and pull out the blade, but tonight he doesn’t have the energy.

The journey to the couch is harder than it should be, and he all but collapses into the cushions, all the time spent vertically has caused his foot to throb in its cast. 

Mark cannot do anything in half-measures, and breaking his toes had been no exception. Half-assing is not something he can do, and his poor fractured phalanges have paid the price for his innate need to throw himself into everything he does. Apparently, this includes breaking bones. A vacuum, hammer, and trailer hitch had all bombarded his poor toes over the past week, effectively crushing two of them, leaving two more with major contusions. 

Not for the first time of his life, Mark wishes he could rein himself in, and not go so goddamn hard all the time. If he could just be mediocre, for once, maybe things wouldn’t backfire quite so badly. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt so much when something he wants so badly doesn’t work out. 

He doesn’t flip on the lamp, or the ceiling fan light, or even the TV. Once he sits, he stills, he ruminates all the things he should not, all the reasons he had turned down every drink his friends had offered him that night. Even without partaking in the chaotic shitfest the night had turned into, Mark can smell tequila and rum and beer on his shirt, traces of it bare enough that he thinks every few seconds he’s imagining the scents. It was supposed to have been a distraction, their antics. They asked if he had a good time, and he said yes. They smiled as if they had achieved something, and Mark didn’t want to let them down.

What would happen if he did? Would they decide he was too tiresome? Would it be too exhausting to tell him goodbye? Would they think him worth the trouble?

Mark rolls his eyes at himself. That’s not fair. That’s a mean thought from a mean brain that he isn’t very fond of at the moment, but can’t help listening to. Right about now, he’d rather like to be deaf.

When his friends asked why he wouldn’t drink‒ he, who often became the bubbliest of them all after far less alcohol than it should take‒ he already had an answer prepared. If he drank, he would have been mixing alcohol with painkillers, and that was a dangerous combination, healthwise. It sounds real enough. Any Google search will support his reasoning.

But in truth, Mark simply knows himself better than any of them ever will. Renjun may know his middle name and favorite food when he’s sad, Jaemin may know that he actually despises boba tea with his whole entity, regardless of how often he drinks it with his friends because they all love it, Jeno may know that he never vacuums under his desk and every six months he finds some lost treasure that brightens his whole week, and so on, and so on. What none of them will ever know of, however, is that ugly little monster inside of him that greeds and lusts and wants for something to take away the pain they have only glimpsed. The tip of the iceberg made them wince as if they had seen the whole damn thing. 

Only one person has been privy to more information than those snippets he’d allowed the others to see. Only one person has been admitted past the barred gates around his heart that years of bad experiences and insecurity have barricaded.

He cannot do anything in half-measures, not even the things he knows will end up hurting him in the long run.

Mark knows he’s in a bad space, more than anyone else ever will, and he knows his personality type and his penchant for addictions. 

Thus far, most have been harmless, or as close to harmless as an addiction can get, be it caffeine or sugar, or something else that could mess him up. Nothing that would truly fuck him up. The one time he has slipped in that regard, done something stupid and desperate, something really bad, he elects to ignore. Better to forget about it and move on, even though it haunts him during the worst of times.

This isn’t the worst of times, just bad, just painful. He knows this, and he knows it’s a part of life, and a part of growing up. Either way, he doesn’t trust himself. If he drinks now, feels that pleasant tingle in his fingertips and how his mind goes to the fun and funny places, he won’t want to come back. He won’t want to come down.

He keeps spiralling down.

Mark sighs, shifts on the couch, and the change in the indented leather causes his crutches to fall. They tumble to the ground away from him, and Mark just stares for a while. It seems like the thing to do, what with the exhaustion so settled so deep in his bones he thinks it must be playing cards with his bone marrow. It crept in slowly and made a home, that unassuming friend of a friend that eventually throws the whole dynamic out of balance. That’s what it felt like, feels like, will probably continue to feel like for a long time. 

It had been a long few months, and as he thinks, he begins to think about things he should not.

He doesn’t want to.

He turns on the TV. 

There’s nothing that he wants to watch, nothing he cares to see, but he flips through the channels anyway, looking and looking and looking. The colored, faltering light illuminates the tidy room, and Mark’s slightly-less-tidy appearance. The bags under his eyes are to be expected, he can feel them throughout the day, tiredness swelling just enough to be noticeable. The threads on his ripped jeans have frayed more than can be considered fashionable, but they are clean, as is his t-shirt. No one would take him for anything other than a functioning member of society, if a little overworked. 

They’d be right, as he still does all of the things he is meant to do, but that doesn’t change the fact that he desperately wishes he could stop for a while. Even if he were to stop, what would he do? He knows he won’t rest. It’s really all just a load of shit, isn’t it, when you’re so tired that you can’t help but think about things that hurt you, and that pain keeps you awake in this terrible cycle of exhaustion and agony.

Men in Black II is playing on FX, a questionably horrible choice, but he puts down the remote after turning up the volume. For a few minutes he tries in vain to simply watch it, not read into the reason he chose to stop here, on this film he has little reason to enjoy. As the movie winds on, he notices all of the things that had been pointed out to him by… By someone. 

And, just as unassuming, his mind toes the line drawn in the sand. Mark exhales heavily, eyes drooping, and doesn’t realize the force of it blows away the boundary. It’s too late at night, too late in life, and his brain cheerily takes the reins from his weary hands. He’s being led somewhere he does not want to be, oblivious to the path he’s on.

Maybe he’s not oblivious, actually. Maybe he’s just resigned. Maybe he’s become so used to the loneliness that follows being left that it feels just as much a companion of his. Maybe he wants to indulge his oldest friend.

Mentally, he lists all the plotholes and poor qualities, and it sounds like Donghyuck’s voice in his head. It sounds like Donghyuck’s irritation and his exasperation and his lovely little habit of talking during movies that Mark never minded. It’s a sound that makes him smile, full and hollow, endeared and anguished. With Donghyuck on his mind, he probably looks more worse for wear than he did minutes ago, a little less normal and a lot more yearning.

Yearning is a stupid word. It invokes something pathetic in him, something confused, something that wants to sound less like a lamenting sixteen year old and more like the grown up he is. The context attached to the word makes him feel dumb, and small. He’s an adult, a college student with a career and an apartment and an emergency fund. He’s a bonafide mature person. He even knows how to do laundry properly, for God’s sake.

He shouldn’t be  _ yearning _ for something he lost. He should move on. He should let go.

He should have bit the bullet and drank something.

At the end of a lazily constructed cliffhanger, the scene fades to black and commercials begin. He’s almost relieved, though he’s not sure why. He doesn’t much care to chase the thought, not when Donghyuck is on his mind and he can imagine what it would have been like to watch the movie together. Oh, maybe that’s why he’s relieved. This thought doesn’t feel as good as he hoped it would. More than anything it burns, but not like fire. It burns like he’s stuck his whole body in a bucket of ice and his nerve endings are so shocked by the sudden change that they can’t tell fire from ice and all he knows is that he wants out, he wants to be as far away from this sensation as possible.

When did he start associating Donghyuck with anything other than joy?

The first commercial is one about Campbell's soup, the second Mark cares less about because it isn’t food, but it is the third that catches his attention. It’s about his phone plan provider. 

If he were a regular human, he’d think ‘oh, that’s what I use,’ and be done with it. Unfortunately for him, his brain is on a warpath and he can’t will himself to take his thoughts back. Every second he spends with Donghyuck on his mind, though, he grows more and more conscious of that ache between his ribs that he has ignored the entire day. It always gets worse at night though, right before he sleeps.

Mark swallows, winces, wonders why his throat feels clogged and his mouth parched.

Mark calls him Donghyuck so much now, unable to find a synonym for his name that he is able to use. There used to be so many. Now all there is is Donghyuck. Donghyuck Donghyuck Donghyuck. Not his best friend, not the person he loves, not Full Sun, or sweetheart, or baby, or any of the things he used to be allowed to call him.

God, he wants to call him.

He hasn’t talked to him in what, three months? He asks himself the question as if the festering thought hadn’t infected his brain every day since he realized what happened, as if he hadn’t been counting even as he tried so hard not to. 

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and some things can’t be chalked up to simply being busy. There’s a point where it becomes intentional. It has to be intentional. Mark doesn’t want to admit it has to be intentional.

Part of him still hopes it isn’t, but the rest of him knows better. His mind wanders to the first time anxiety had set in, had fidgeted in the corner of his brain and slid a paper towards him with the words ‘ _ he doesn’t care about you anymore’ _ written in bold red ink. Mark stared at the color for a while, smiling, before he processed the words on the page. He crumpled the paper and threw it away a dozen times, but it always came back pristine, imprinted on his eyelids every time he blinked at the little check mark underneath his last message.

Another week after that day, and Mark had tried something stupid, had asked if it was his fault and if there was anything he could do. At the time he thought, even if it wasn’t his fault, surely knowing those insecurities existed would prompt some form of response. Four words were all he needed. It’s not his fault. It is his fault.

Either would have been fine with him. Either would have provided a platform for him to stand on, rather than the quicksand he found himself caught in.

That same insecurity that prompted him that week came back to bite him in the ass. Four texts over the span of a month without a response made him feel clingy, made him question if he was going crazy. Was it too much, too pushy? Was he demanding his presence be acknowledged in a place where it was not wanted? Was it wanted, and he was just overreacting?

Should it bother him?

It did. 

It does. Whether it should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter anymore; it does. It hurts him and there’s no hiding from that, not even in the darkness of his unlit apartment.

The movie plays on the screen again, but Mark can’t follow it, doesn’t know what is happening or why. The jingle from the commercial still plays in his head. He still has the urge to take out his phone.

What would be his excuse? He isn’t drunk, or high, or angry enough to demand answers. He hasn’t been angry at any point, doesn’t want to feel that way towards someone he cares about. He’s just hurt, and he thinks he’s the only one. 

Besides, even if he were to text, after two months of nothing he knows he won’t be answered. He’ll see that stupid fucking check mark. 

The TV screen becomes distorted, blurry. Mark can’t blink it away, and he doesn’t know if it’s the tiredness or the sadness that has gotten to him. 

He hates to think it’s heartbreak.

He hates to admit most nights end like this.

As he has done every night for the past few weeks, he takes out his phone and checks. His ringer is on, so he would have been notified of a message. How idiotic of him to hope, to want it. He doesn’t even know what he wants to read at this point, it’s been so long. What is there to say?

Three one-line sentences, and a paragraph of text, all in blue. Mark sighs. He keeps staring until the movie ends, doesn’t look away until the TV screen times out and his world blinks back into blackness.

Normally this is where he would accept it, let his brain rot in the overwhelming lack of serotonin and dopamine. Tonight he feels a little too masochistic for that. They hadn’t texted in months, and it had been longer than that since he even heard Donghyuck’s voice. He just wants to hear his voice right now, hear him talk about nothing and everything and anything in between. Donghyuck curses when he stutters over a word, calls himself a dumbass, and Mark wants to think quietly to himself that Donghyuck is anything but. He doesn’t say it, though, not usually. It doesn’t do much good, and that’s okay. 

He never needed to change Donghyuck’s mind about himself, that wasn’t his fight. He just wanted to show him what he saw, how differently he thought of the boy with the universe dancing in his eyes.

Mark opens his voicemail. 

For all his talk about being strong and capable, there are some things that make him feel pathetic, things that bring him comfort that he knows shouldn’t anymore.

… Is it wrong of him to do this? Is it something Donghyuck would be uncomfortable with if he knew? The bitterness inside tells Mark that Donghyuck forfeited his right to have any say in Mark’s actions. He clicks play.

He listens to Donghyuck threaten him, threaten to cry, tell him he loves him, and threaten him again. One minute and sixteen seconds of laughter and love, of affection and embarrassment. Donghyuck had a funny way of expressing gratitude. It was sweet. It’s salty now, dripping from Mark’s eyes slowly, clear and warm and Mark wipes his hand over his face; he presses play again. Instead of sickly sweet honey kissing his ears it is seawater in his lungs and stuck in his throat, pouring out past his lash line.

“ _ I want to see you soon, _ ” Donghyuck said, quietly, at the end, like it was a secret, like it meant more than it did. Mark bites his fist and tries to control his breaths.

April 21st, 5:46 p.m.. It’s the only voicemail he has saved on his phone. He presses play again with a shaky finger. Over and over he tortures himself, and he knows it isn’t all that healthy, but those few seconds where he’s nostalgic and smiling and remembering how it felt that first time to know he’d finally done it, he’d finally flustered Donghyuck and made him happy. Mark remembers the rest of his week was tinted rose gold.

Someone, Mark forgets who, once said nostalgia is a liar who paints things to be better than they were. Considering where they ended up, he guesses there may be some truth to the sentiment. That doesn’t stop him from pressing play again, and again, until his phone screen goes black and he realizes he’s run out of battery.

He’s not ready to stop listening, stop wanting, stop thinking about it. Not yet. 

He can’t throw away a year and a half of love and friendship so easily. 

A worse idea calls, and without the strength to fight it, he hobbles down that rabbit hole that coaxes him forwards, pulls him deeper and farther down. 

The carpet is soft on his knees, the comforter of his bed soft on his hands when he pulls it up, uncovering the storage beneath his bed frame. His phone has been plugged in, thrown up onto the neatly tucked sheets. There’s this box under his bed, one that’s been there since May 07, and one he hasn’t touched since May 25. 

It’s a pretty box, one he’d spent far too long picking out. He wanted something elegant, yet plain. He wanted it to be good quality, but he didn’t want it to be the center of attention in the room. He wanted what was inside to be what mattered. He wanted what was inside to matter. 

The friendship he’d had with Donghyuck was precious to him, so much so that he was terrified to ever show him this box, this hand-crafted heart of his, its chambers filled with memories and things Mark has told him before but never in the right context. Never with the right meaning. 

There were times when the words tried to burst from his chest, his mind so set on not letting them fall from his lips that they attempted to bore their way past his ribs and into the air, desperate for the relief and the freedom of being known. Mark would place a hand over his heart at those times, begging it to still, to wait, to beat slowly no matter how Donghyuck teased him. The hardest times weren’t when he called Mark his baby, or when he told Mark that he was talented, or cute, or sweet. 

When Mark wanted to tell him most were the times Donghyuck would admit something he wouldn’t usually tell, or when he would go on a tangent about something wholly unrelated to Mark. Those times when Donghyuck was completely himself without any care that Mark was listening, that Mark was enraptured by every word, those were the times when Mark would think it. It would ring loud and clear between his ears and he wanted to say it so badly. The timing was never right.

In hindsight, maybe it’s a good thing he held his tongue.

On May 07, Mark had been a little too tired for his own good, a little too drunk on sunshine, a little too honest. He’d asked to know, to learn, to have more of Donghyuck to love. He loathed that he did not know his favorite color. He knew Donghyuck had told him before, once, when he was similarly out of his mind with exhaustion because he never seems to learn his lessons. Donghyuck had laughed him off, such a brilliant sound, and told him to sleep. 

Mark remembers this as his fingertips trace over the top of smooth pine, burnished a warm brown. 

Mark remembers coming back the next day, pouting and asking again. He remembers how he felt when Donghyuck told him that his favorite color always changes, remembers the lightbulb that had gone off and his shy promise to always ask in the future, to always learn and love the way Donghyuck lives and laughs. That very afternoon he’d gone to every craft and antique store in a thirty mile radius. 

All for the box, which was not by any means the important part of his plan. 

It was such a stupid plan.

He feels foolish, thinking about it. Almost more foolish than he feels for having believed Donghyuck would stay, would be different from the others he somehow found the courage to trust. He is a fool, for every reason he can think of.

On the frontmost panel of wood, he’d pasted a picture of them together. At the time of the photo he hadn’t realized how stupidly obvious he was, how easily one could tell that his gaze hadn’t been focused on the camera, but on the other boy captured by its lens. And here he thought he’d been slick. What a loser.

Mark chuckles, tells himself it isn’t as throaty and wet as it is, pretends the sound is joyful. He’s doing this to feel happy, to remember the good when he feels so bad. This moment will pass, he just needs something to hold onto through it. His grip on the box tightens, and he sits back on his calf, foot tucked underneath him, his injured leg bent at an odd angle to avoid pressure on his foot.

The treasure chest opens with a soft click, and something inside Mark cracks a little further. Life has not shattered him, not yet, and he doubts it ever will, but fuck if the fractures it has left on his porcelain heart haven’t hurt. What he doesn’t expect to seep from the wound is anger. He hasn’t felt it towards Donghyuck, not yet, and he never thought he would.

He’s right, of course.

Idiot that he is, he’s not stupid. He knows himself well enough to know the rage he feels isn’t towards Donghyuck. He isn’t kind enough to himself for that. He’s mad at himself. He’s furious that once again he’s in a position where he has lost someone he cares about, he has been pushed aside and left there. He’s hurt, so very badly, because for all the effort he puts into everything, he has made himself someone who  _ can _ be replaced, or abandoned. He is expendable, interchangeable, dispensable.

He is despicable, and on nights like this, he despises himself more than anyone else.

The tears in his eyes have slowed, but he feels horribly breakable in the moment, staring down at a dozen trinkets carefully laid on a bed of white silk. They sit there, all of these little things that remind him of Donghyuck, these little moments he captured, these pictures of colors with the dates Donghyuck told him written on the back, a dozen little  _ I love you _ ’s that are so fucking pathetic Mark cannot believe himself.

And then the kicker at the bottom of it all, because Mark can’t do a goddamn thing half-measure.

The one that made him the most nervous was one he’d bought on impulse, on sight when he’d thought of Donghyuck and been walking through a mall. It had been three days, and he couldn’t find anything dark blue that stood out, that screamed “a chaotic dumbass would love this!” when Mark walked by. 

His touch is hesitant, almost scared, when he lifts the small velvet box from where it was previously tucked into the corner of white fabric. 

There were so many more times he wanted to ask about his favorite color over the months, so many more memories and things he wanted to fill his little wooden heart with. 

More than any of the others, this one, he knew, was going to be  _ it _ . He would show this one to Donghyuck last, bury it under all of the others so that when he picked through all the pieces of Mark’s affection he would come to this one at the end. It would feel wrong if he came to this before the others. 

Inside the box, on a bed of black satin, is a necklace that feels far too pretty to be held in Mark’s hands, which seem ugly and calloused by comparison. All of him feels ugly by comparison, but that might just be because Mark has felt ugly in general of late. 

Aquamarine somehow catches light that doesn’t exist in the room, glints and gleams. 

By this time Mark’s vision has adjusted to the night, but it was more the tactile feeling of the trinkets that calmed his breathing and his mind. The sight though, the glow of the jewelry in its case that seemed somehow resplendent, that was the hand reaching from the dark pit to drag him down by his throat. 

It pulls the anger from his lungs up and out through his windpipe, takes all the words of hate he’d thought towards himself and lets them burn the ground at his feet until it is charred black. And he cries.

He just wanted to stay by Donghyuck’s side. That was all. He wanted Donghyuck to be different and he wanted Donghyuck to want him back. Not even as a lover, just as a person. 

He slumps forward over the box, cradles it in his lap. His broken foot aches something fierce from how it presses against the leg of his bed frame, but it doesn’t compare. He’d like to break it twice over, focus on that pain instead of this one that somehow keeps finding him, even when he thinks he’s found a place to stop running.

He’d intended to keep filling the box. He has a dozen more colors of red, more pictures of places he wants to take Donghyuck, sights he wants to watch take Donghyuck’s breath away. But then he just couldn’t ask. He couldn’t ask and he couldn’t talk and he was forcibly mute. Four blue bubbles of text.

There were so many things he wanted to say. 

He wonders if he weren’t in love with Donghyuck, would the silence hurt less? Would this jagged edge of their friendship breaking not cut quite so deep?

He doesn’t think so.

Only in recent months did he realize his feelings had shifted from strictly platonic to something more, and even then his desire to see Donghyuck grow and glow and be loved had  _ nothing _ to do with his desire to be the one to love him.

He thinks he’d throw this foolish little box into the ocean before he let it break his friendship with Donghyuck. He’d take every last note, every well wish, and cast it away with any notion of romantic pursuit he desired. He would stop it all, and simply love Donghyuck as Donghyuck wanted to be loved.

True to his word, he has stopped it all, because Donghyuck doesn’t want to be loved by him. Not as a friend. Not as something more than a friend. Not as anything at all. 

And Mark doesn’t think he’ll ever know why.

He restores everything inside the box, and carefully slides it back under his bed. Opening it was a mistake. Looking at it was a mistake. Keeping it is a mistake. 

But Mark doesn’t do anything in half-measures. Heartbreak is not exempt from this rule.

Someday, he’ll have to relearn to pick up the pieces of himself. He’ll have to take that box and throw it away, take the parts of his heart that are worth keeping and put them back in his chest.

Tonight, though, there isn’t much more he can do than restart his phone, and open his voicemail again. 

“ _ Mark... you’re a dead son of a bitch! _ ” Donghyuck laughs.

Mark smiles somberly, and closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you again for reading! 
> 
> Please remember to be kind to yourselves, and the people around you. Don't forget to uplift your friends and those you love, and remember to take good care of yourself. You are precious, precious creatures.
> 
> Please feel free to leave comments, as I do love to read them, whether they be praise, criticism, or just a summary of your day. I'm glad to hear anything. (please for the love of god, quarantine has me desperate for human interaction and i am perfectly alright with laying down my dignity and begging for some here)


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